Narcissistic Abuse Recovery: Fight vs Fawn Nervous System Responses

Written by Roland Bal

When you are a child and are growing up, you need sufficient validation from your parents or a prime caregiver to develop a healthy sense of self and build emotional resilience.

When sufficient love and validation—as in not too little and also not excessively—is provided in childhood, you are less likely to be constantly on the lookout for validation when you are an adult.

Child Abuse and How Your Sense of Self Gets Compromised

When you have been subjected to psychological, physical, or sexual abuse as a child, that sense of belonging, feeling loved, feeling safe, and validated goes out of the window. Even more so when the abuse happened at home or within the family, which is very often the case.

Being abused and having your sense of belonging compromised will either make you guard your emotional space very tightly, through a fight response, or you might channel your actions into a fawn response.

When you are a child and are growing up, you need sufficient validation from your parents or a prime caregiver to develop a healthy sense of self and build emotional resilience.

The fawn response makes you overly invest your energy in others, in order to get a sense of validation either from them or through your actions.

Both the fight and fawn response are a set of compensatory reactions that attempt to make up for a lack of belonging, feeling loved, and validated.

Survival Patterns of Anger-Fight, or Anxious-Fawn

That hurt of rejection, lack of validation and not belonging, compounded by the abuse you endured, sets in motion a set of reactive survival patterns of either fight, flight, or please that will become habitual and to which you will default over time.

Our minds move in opposites. When on a core level you feel unloved or not validated, you will instinctively seek for its opposite, which is validation, to compensate for that lack of validation.

You might go about that in different ways. You might make yourself submissive or subservient to others, and through pleasing attempt to make up for that lack of belonging.

On the other hand, you might become hyper-ambitious, controlling, and perhaps have narcissistic traits, in order to prove to yourself and to others that you are worthy; this as an attempt to compensate for feeling unworthy, on a core and often unconscious level.

Grief and Sadness: The Fawn and Fight Patterns

On that core level, the emotion related to the hurt of being unloved, lack of belonging, and lack validation is sadness. How you further react to that core level pain shapes your character.

So far, we have laid out the anxious-fawn response and the anger-fight response.

Let's go a bit deeper into what the possible consequences are:

The Fawn Response: People Pleasing as a Trauma Survival Strategy

The anxious-fawn response, as a coping reaction to a breach of your boundaries, acts out by being too invested in other's opinions about you. As a result, you burn yourself out by giving too much of yourself, and in doing so, you set yourself up for being hurt once again.

That giving too much comes with an emotional expectation, which is to want validation for your efforts; and when the expectation isn't met, you will feel rejected or even betrayed.

Also, you more easily fall prey to a charmer or a narcissist who plays on your need for validation for the sake of his or her own seeking of validation through control and manipulation.

It gets messy!

How the Anxious-Fawn Pattern Shows Up

You might find yourself:

• Over-explaining or over-apologizing constantly
• Taking on other people's emotional burdens as your own
• Saying yes when you want to say no
• Feeling responsible for how others feel
• Struggling to express anger or set boundaries
• Feeling exhausted from constantly giving
• Attracting people who take advantage of you

When love, attention, and bonding is taken away from you, either through natural circumstances or deceitful intent, you are left hurt and feeling betrayed.

This re-experiencing of the hurt of disconnection, lack of validation, and lack of belonging further compounds your core-wound, and will possibly keep cycling you through the extremes of reaction: from depression, isolation, lack of self-esteem, and fatigue, back into people-pleasing, being overly expectant, and taking on too much that isn't yours.

How the Fight Response Develops After Emotional Abuse and Trauma

The second type of coping reaction and character forming is the anger-fight response. You might act that out through having very tight boundaries and keeping others away from yourself, or you act that out through wanting to control and dominate the environment, circumstances, and people around you.

The latter turns out to be the more destructive response, and many of those in power and business, unfortunately, act out of that compensatory emotional pattern.

The anger-fight response is prime material for becoming a psychopath and/or narcissist when taken to further extremes. To understand how trauma creates these patterns, read root cause of narcissism.

The anger-fight response similarly rests on compensation. It differs in that you "choose" an anger-fight response in order to cope and survive with feeling overwhelmed, as opposed to choosing an anxious-fawn response.

The compensation is that you seek validation through either isolation or success, prestige, control, and domination to make up for lack of validation, not belonging, feeling unworthy or unloved.

How the Anger-Fight Pattern Shows Up

You might find yourself:

• Keeping people at a distance emotionally
• Having rigid, inflexible boundaries
• Needing to control your environment
• Quick to anger when things don't go your way
• Struggling with vulnerability or asking for help
• Isolating yourself to feel safe
• Overworking to prove your worth

Why You Keep Attracting Narcissists: The Nervous System Pattern

If you have an anxious-fawn pattern, you're essentially advertising yourself as someone who will:

• Put the narcissist's needs first
• Accept blame and responsibility
• Keep trying to make things work
• Not set firm boundaries
• Provide endless validation

The narcissist can sense this. They're looking for someone who will compensate for their lack of internal validation through control and manipulation. This dynamic is explored in depth in narcissist and people pleaser.

It's a lock and key situation. Your need to please fits their need to control. Your need for validation fits their need to withhold it and use it as leverage.

Until you address the core wound—that deep sadness and lack of belonging from childhood—you will keep recreating this dynamic.

Somatic Healing from Narcissistic Abuse: Regulating Fight or Fawn Responses

Here's what needs to happen:

1. Process the Core Emotion

That sadness from childhood—the hurt of not being loved, not belonging, not being validated—has to be felt and processed.

Cognitive work alone won't do it. You need somatic processing to work through what's held in your body.

2. Learn to Access Anger Constructively

If you're stuck in anxious-fawn, you need to learn how to access anger in a healthy way. To start to use anger-energy as a way of setting healthy boundaries.

Without anger-energy, which is self-validation, you can't set boundaries. You'll keep getting walked over.

3. Build Self-Validation

Become aware of how you are looking outside yourself by default for validation. That very awareness arrests that movement and thereby you stop giving away your power to others.

You then carefully start the process of self-validation. You can ask yourself "Do I want or not want to be here, do this, or be with this person".

Your worth becomes less dependent on what others think of you.

4. Recognize the Pattern in Real Time

When you notice yourself:

• Over-explaining
• Taking on too much
• Feeling responsible for someone else's emotions
• Saying yes when you want to say no

That's the default pattern. That's your cue to do something different. That awareness gives you another option. Another pathway.

This Is Deep Work

You're not just changing your mind about things. You're rewiring survival patterns that formed when you were young and didn't have other options.

It takes time. It takes processing emotion. It takes learning new responses.

But it's possible.

People who were stuck in these cycles for decades make fundamental shifts when they do the work—cognitive and somatic combined.